Anastasia Khoroshilova, born in 1978 in Moscow,
belongs to the
new generation of artists from “post-diaspora”
Russia. Educated
and living abroad, they see themselves as part of
the international
scene, not as emigrants. Khoroshilova’s acclaimed
series
Islanders documents a Russia inaccessible to
tourists: a village, a
military town, an orphanage, a dance academy
and, in the newest
addition to the project, Sambo 70, young wrestlers
posing in
gymnasia. The apparently cool objectivism of these
works, and
their unstudied poses – from Kutcher-esque
swagger to Kruschevlike
solidity – yield complex social and psychological
studies.

American Icons covers every decade of the 20th
century and
illustrates the formative nature of photojournalism
in documenting
globalization as it was happening. While the history
of
photography is richly based in Europe, American
photographers
embraced it with exuberance. Stieglitz’s Steerage,
documenting
the first wave of transmigration in 1907, literally
and figuratively
changed the face of America. Yet it took a Swiss,
Robert Frank,
to show what the Americans really looked like.
Such images
and others – from the depression-era FSA and f64
group whose
prints devised fantasies of escapism, to Arbus,
Goldin and
Winogrand – together depict the real American
melting pot.